YouSaid · the spoken record

Ethan Mollick

lines on the record: 77
first: 2024-07-31
most recent: 2024-07-31
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“This has been wonderful, too. Please don't tell Sam Allman. I disagreed with him because he's building a machine god and I don't want him to be angry with me.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very worried about is when you realize as a mill manager that AI does your work and nobody cares, what does that mean for the nature of work? How does that matter if people don't care? Like if AI subs in and does stuff, if your boss is responding with an AI answer to the emails you send them. And I think that that meaning crisis is one we're not talking about enough. It's one thing to be replaced at a job. It's another semi-replace yourself and realize why am I doing this? And I think that's going to be a bigger issue that we're not talking about.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The question that I think people should be asking and that I don't have an answer to yet is why aren't so many people bouncing off these systems? Like why are they not, you know, why are so many people using them a little bit and not forever? Because I don't think it's just simple like it didn't work. People are getting kind of freaked out by these things in ways that we don't really understand how humans are relating to these tools. Like we always talk about the systems, the technology, how industry is going to change. And I don't mean just like the dating thing, which tends to be like, well, you have a relationship with AI, but like, how are we relating to these kind of tools? That's one of the questions. Let me do a second take on this. The thing that I would be thinking about because it's related is meaning. People don't ask me enough about meaning of work. That matters a lot. You know, Graber is bullshit jobs, I think, was mostly not correct based on survey data and other stuff we saw, but it's real. People do feel iniated from work. People do like most employees say they're bored at least 10% of the time at work, but they're doing work that they feel is meaningful. When you survey people, most people think their jobs matter in the world. And what's going to happen that I'm”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How clever these things are. If you haven't seen my Twitter feed where I asked the AI term move references about Squid from the novel Alkine and the Western Front, I just look for that because like these systems are really clever. They're kind of joyful to use. And I think that that's kind of surprising.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your requirement in any supply chain pipeline is to eat the value. If you're, you know, like that's the whole idea of how those things work. So if you're spending a lot of money on ships, you go into chip making. Just like if you're spending lots of money on warehousing, you figure out a way to reduce your warehouse costs. They're not going to figure something out.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Accumulation of evidence, right? So we talked about Kevin Scott saying scale like there's a bunch of people who weren't talking about scaling, solving everything six months ago or eight months ago who are now more confident, which indicates to me another generation of models came out and everyone at all the labs are getting that haunted look in their eye again. I don't know when we'll see these models, but they're clearly people are seeing things that indicate to me that there's more left in the curve and they're all talking about it.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have gone back and forth on how much juice the technology has left, and now I'm back to the it has lots of juice left, like the exponential continues for a while. And I think I was not clear on that for a long time.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The most concerning future, I think, is one where we lose agency and not necessarily to the AI systems, but to the systems that incorporate AI. What I mean by that is we have a chance to make AI be used for human thriving. That's not an automatic process, right? That means not firing people when you have AI in your company, but it means figuring out other uses for them that are valuable. It means building systems that help people feel like they're accomplishing more as a result of using these things. And I worry we're not seeing enough people modeling that kind of behavior. It's all about just the technology itself and then how do we get cost savings.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel like the very simple idea that AI is very profoundly much better than people think and is keep getting better is something that I think most people don't actually believe.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are ways of doing this to scatter buyers across multiple locations and they all do like it is very much true that a lot of your unnamed BCs do seem to have asked a lot of friends to buy book copies of their book.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People do that all the time. The New York Times has a small kabbal of people who refuse to talk about how they do this, so they use the number ranking, but then they also try and exclude bulk buys. They actually try and cut that out. So you'll notice there's a little dagger next to the name of companies in the bestseller list that they think that they're including, but they still had potential bulk buys. I actually got the little dagger on mine because a company bought 500 copies, which wasn't the main reason for the list, but they found that suspicious. They're trying to filter that out by hand. But yes, you can often buy your way into the list and people do that all the time.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, that problem has already happened, right? I mean, you know, to me, the really interesting thing is like Suno and Odio and they're getting pretty good. At what point does having an AI generated song playlist, you know, that has a couple real musicians but also makes up songs based? Like that doesn't feel as far off for in terms of people enjoying it. Like what happens to content creation is a very big deal, right? I mean, like I'm an author, my books in New York Times bestseller, that's amazing. I don't think people realize how few copies you need to be to be a New York Times bestseller. Like if you're like you're selling like 6,000 hardcover copies in a week, that's getting on the New York Times bestseller list. Attention's already scattered across. The one thing you'd hope for is maybe AI creates better connections in some ways”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Believe he said he's going to eat babies in minute three, and everybody shares it online who should know better and without actually watching the video at all. Like when I post, have a viral tweet, nobody clicks the link. I feel like we way overestimate people and therefore how much this stuff was going to matter. But in a world where AI is hyper-persuasive, this does change things. In a world where AI gives really good advice on everything, people should have an AI second advisor happening in every role, including in politics, right? That would make things better. But people aren't going to listen to it. Politics changes much more slowly, is much more human than people think. By the way, it plugs into larger issues of like when we can produce all this stuff on demand, what is actually valuable or not. I mean, everything is going to change. It's very unrealistic predictions how a general purpose technology rolls out. But I do think people overestimate how quickly the short-term change is going to be. And as usual from Mara's law, underestimate the long term.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When something feels like a dystopia to most people, it probably is something that's not going to happen very quickly. Human systems are complicated. I just keep seeing this technological view, which is like in a rational world, the machines will rule us all. It's just people don't want that, right? So like we already have algorithms ruling lots of what we do, you know, your FICO score determines a huge amount of things that happen in your life. And that's an algorithm. Like we have these kind of systems in place, but the idea of an overall all-seeing kind of approach, it's hard. Now, on the other hand, we do find that AI is hyper persuasive already, right? In a controlled experiment where you do where you're asked to talk to a normal person versus the AI, you're 81.7% more likely to change your views to the AI's view than to a human's view. That is going to change marketing in very big waves, which is going to change politics, right? Deepfakes are going to be a big deal already, although it's been funny how little a big deal they are because it just turns out all you need to do is show a video of politician X talking and say, I can't.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But right now, I think the energy debate's an interesting one because, again, it's one where doomers and optimists sort of like to talk about, because on the downside risk, when I meet people who are skeptical at AI, the first thing they talk about is energy use. And the truth is that AI uses a lot more energy per query. We don't know exactly, but probably two orders of magnitude than a Google search, but a lot less orders of magnitude energy than a human doing the same amount of work, right? with a laptop. You know, how do we balance those kind of things becomes an issue? Right now, 1% of US power goes to data centers and 10% of that goes to AI at most. So we have a lot of room left at the top before this becomes an issue. So again, we're assuming AGI is available, instantly useful, and in which case absolutely compute becomes an energy becomes the issue. But then that becomes the reverse salient. And, you know, there's a lot of money to be made that if the currency of the future is compute, a computer is energy, then there's a hell of a lot of money to be made in building your own nuclear power plants.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what Sam believes. I mean, Sam believes in AGI, and he believes that it's going to be achievable in the near term, right? And when you talk to OpenAI insiders, they feel the same way. If that's the case, if intelligence and demand is the case, intelligence on demand is power hungry, and there's infinite demand for intelligence on demand because there will be, right? If you have an AGI, I want that to be looking over all my medical records and monitoring our airspace and, you know, finding scientific ideas and helping me with a project I have to do and also booking tickets for the ultimate trip. There is infinite demand for intelligence, right? So then compute becomes the currency and energy becomes the big deal. That will make a big deal in that case. And we're going to build a lot of nuclear power plants, I guess, in relatively short order. It seems like that's a, or AGI figures how to do fusion and it doesn't matter, or we all get turned into batteries all a matrix, although we don't produce enough wattage. So I don't think that's really the issue of training data. That's what the AIs will use us for. But anyway, mostly joking.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A couple companies already have this. Watch what you're typing and make sure you're not pasting stuff in from AI. Again, I don't necessarily recommend it, but like these are possibilities. I think we are underestimating how much you can do those kind of things. Homework is valuable. Cheating is bad. What is AI cheating? We have to define that. I'm a big, but the other option is transformation. My classes are 100% AI based at this point. Students have AI mentors and tutors they talk to. They have AI based assignments. When they learn how to do hiring, I build a simulator that actually makes them have to fake hire somebody and the AI plays the person they're interviewing and gives them multiple choice answers and they have to reflect on the assignment. There's one of the other assignments is they have to teach the AI to do something. You could do really exciting stuff. It's just not going to happen right away.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Course, there is. Everybody was already cheating. Like, there's this great study at a repeating university that found that homework improved when you did the homework and improved something like 80% of people's test scores in 2008. And by 2020, it only helped 20% of people. And that's not because homework stopped helping. It's because everyone was cheating. And so we have ways around this. There's really two options in how to use AI in education. One of them is to ban it cautiously, right? People are still going to use as explainers and stuff like that, but you have in-class tests and blue book writing. Like we've solved this problem in math. And like you make people do exercises and do work. Nobody likes it, but there's no shortcut to learning. It sounds dumb. It's like what your teacher said out turns out it's true. You need a grinding amount of work to understand something. You need to do interleaved practice. You need to like there's a lot of stuff you need to do to learn something. And so we absolutely can make you do blue book work in class. We absolutely can install terrible monitoring systems. I don't like this approach, but like.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They tell you about whether that's going to work or not, or whether it's a stupid idea or a good idea, or whether the subtleties that the system is missing are a problem or not. Because I'm an expert. And if you're not an expert, you're going to be like, that looks really good. So like expertise actually matters. I'm sure in the same way, you know, it's one of the things I actually, when I talk to my students and teach them how to pitch, right, one of the things I talk about. I think expertise is going to matter a lot here.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe it's not clear that that is the key to tutoring the bond with the human being, forcing people to confront what they don't know turns out to be a lot of the value of tutoring. So tutoring is often reflective back. So when we build a tutor chat bot, right, what that tutor chat bot, like the way we test, by the way, education and technology chatbots, our rule of thumb is that if it asks you if you understand a topic or you're ready to move on, it's a bad tutor because humans don't know when they're ready to move on or not. What the AI should be doing is asking you questions, probing what you know, and making you expand on what you don't understand and helping you fill those gaps. It's not the one-on-one bond. There are like methods to teaching that we actually know make a difference. Self-reflection makes a difference. Repeated practice makes a difference. Low stakes testing makes a difference. Like to zoom back out to where we talked about before, subject matter expertise is going to be absolutely critical in making AI work. It's a system that experts, I can look at a prompt in entrepreneurship and education.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Education is a complex system. So I think order of magnitude is a very weird thing to talk about because every student has their own talents, abilities, interests, and gaps. The early work in one-on-one tutoring, we don't talk about order magnitude improvement because that doesn't really work in the education world. It's very hard to say what order magnitude is, but we can talk about grades a lot. The classic study that is probably would not be replicable, but it sets up our model is that one-on-one tutoring creates a two-sigma increase in classroom outcomes. That's two standard deviations, which is a fairly huge improvement. You go for the 50th percentile to the 97th percentile in class. We have no idea if that's going to hold up with AI tutoring, but if we could do that, that is amazing an improvement as you could possibly ask for. I mean, a 10% improvement is amazing. I kind of feel like aiming for order magnitude education, if we can get improvement in a system, we're in great shape.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All outside of class, that's your homework. Read the book, do that. Then your homework is in class where you can mess up in front of people and work in teams and you learn by kind of watching other people how you're doing it. The teacher can help you solve problems. I think flipped classrooms are a very natural fit and active learning with AI-based approaches. So instead of having a passive video you watch, you'll have an AI tutor outside of class. You'll log into the school's website and that tutor will be amazing. It'll be adapted to you. And then it'll pass that information on into the classroom setting where you actually, the teacher gets advanced stuff. And by the way, we've actually built a version of this already at the Journal of AI Lab at Warton. We'll be open sourcing all of that, like that does this kind of stuff. It's not that hard to imagine. We just have ways to go still.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we actually have a lot of research on this. It turns out that first of all, there's a couple things you need to know about learning that people don't tend to think about, which is learning is hard and sucks. What makes you feel like you're learning isn't what's learning. Like you have to do grinding work. There's no solution to it. It's just like any other thing like exercise or anything else. You have to be pushed to desirable difficulties where you're having trouble if you're not failing in a thing. You're not working hard enough. Which way you often need intrinsic motivation. And the second thing is we actually have some research. We know things like active learning where you're in a classroom doing activities beats the idea of passive just receiving a lecture. When we have those sets of pieces, there's been a move that kind of fizzled. It's called flipped classrooms that has some early evidence in its favor, which suggests this idea of like classrooms should be about doing stuff and outside of class should be about getting the basics because we can get you to do stuff in the classroom setting. So that would mean that outside of class, what that practically meant is you watch videos outside of class your teacher talking. So the lecture stuff.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of class, you know, AI tutor help. And then inside of class will be activity exercises application where large class size doesn't matter as much. But there is a road to get from here to there.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I hope so, but let's just talk. The first Rand Rise Control trial we have by some of my colleagues at Warton was giving GPT-4 people for math tutoring in Turkey. Now, they didn't do a huge amount of like, you know, it was a signed class and they use the system, but it turns out that everybody who used it used GPD4 without any special prompting or anything else had much higher homework scores and then did much worse in the test because basically the AI just did the work for them. And once you have better prompts that effect disappeared that we didn't see educational gains from it. But I think it's an early sign of like not being naive about how these systems operate, right? Like we need to put the work into building scalply around them. I absolutely believe that we can't be naive about the work that needs to be done here to make this stuff operate. So you can't just drop these systems in, but a good tutor will make a difference. I think in the long term we'll have flipped classrooms where that 20% where that giant classroom is actually fine because a lot of your learning is done outside.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think education is a good starting point, but in education tutoring is the gold standard for interventions based on the research we have. And AI is an incredible one-on-one tutor. Like it's transformative.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they don't really understand what classrooms are for. And so it's all the AI workplace, everyone. And I think we're along, we're not there.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I mean, I think that's a valid question. Some of those things are huge gaps. Some of those things are small gaps. You ask me about that, reviewing the legal document, not really a problem. We're close to that. But like if it does that out of the box, that also implies a lot lowering of hallucination rates below a threshold that they're not currently at. There's no benchmarks on hallucination. So we have no idea how good we're getting on the hallucination rate side. It also, though, implies the ability to seamlessly move between different perspectives. We could do that with agents today, is that an agent-based model is taking action. Like there's so many questions. I would love to have specificity. And that's why I'm saying field specific is great. If you are a lawyer who knows the law field really well, you probably might have some interesting things to think about and where the real gaps are or not. And I don't think a lot of the AI firms know that. I know this because we're deep working with all of them on things like education. And like they don't really understand education. There's no educators there. So they don't really understand what teachers do.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It generates hypotheses, tests them, writes a really good paper, formats in latex, writes the letter to the editor, and handles reviewer responses. We're getting close, but there's a lot of gaps there. Give me a concrete example of what this thing does, and then we could talk about a heuristic. But like 100 times better is a really hard one.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I don't think it's as useful as a heuristic. What does that mean? What is a hundred times better GPD? It's a baffling heuristic to say better. Like what does that mean? It's an uneven system. It has gaps in the world. I mean 100 times better reason. How are you supposed to, like this is what I mean when you start looking at these things, it's like, what the heck am I supposed to do with that? It's a hundred times better. It's a machine god. What? And so I don't like this heuristic because I like, I don't have any way to operate within that. A hundred times better, does that mean it will be able to process an entire legal document and do a very good legal review of a document on its own? Great. That disrupts a huge industry, but that is a actual question about hallucination rates, its ability to handle words, you know, to think about words instead of tokens, to understand precedent, to be okay across different languages, to hold a huge amount in its context window. That feels like a useful question to ask. Could it write an academic paper on its own, right? Where you give it a data set.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That crypto did us dirty in this kind of front, which is like it made all technology feel like hype, and it emphasized again short buck return if you just believe something will happen. And that's really a great way to think.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't trust anything. People are very self-motivated, right? I think the signal you should pay attention to is that people are betting their careers to a large extent on this being possible. And I think there are people who care about their reputations. That is a signal to me. They don't have to be right. I mean, look, I work with Marvin Minsky, like I said. He was there in the 57 conference where they out in Dartmouth where they outlined the concept of AI. I mean, we're in a world where like, you know, AGI is always soon. So I think you would take everything with a grain of salt, but I think you need some coherence about your own viewpoint on this set of stuff. Now, the large companies, I mean, we're seeing a lot of people warning that this is coming soon. I mean, in the meta paper, the paper outlining the release of Llama 3.1 that came out yesterday, it says we see exponentials continuing for the, we don't see any reason why exponentials are going to stop. What does that mean for you as a startup? Feels like a relevant question. You're betting for a future world. So what is that future world look like? And you can't both say everything is changing, but also I'm doing this minor thing.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's just not fun enough in some way. And it's like, okay, great. I'll make it more fun for you. If that cycle is really there, what is your stance on what an AGI world looks like becomes very relevant is all I'm saying.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the common definition of AGI is a machine that's smarter than humans at every task. The machine will decide what to do. Who cares about your stupid product, right? Like you've been making this for humans and getting product market fit, but the humans will say, optimize my trading strategy, or the AI will just decide to optimize your trade strategy. I mean, no one knows what AGI looks like. So I'm not going to try and paint a science fiction future, but I will say there's a huge contradiction between Amara Andreasen saying AGI soon. And like, we're funding a bunch of companies that are helping you. Already, I don't know if you play with them, not that we're anywhere near AGI with this, but you can tell Claude, come up with 30 ideas for a product to serve Market X, then rate them all on quality and feasibility level. Then this is one prompt, by the way. Then create a playable prototype of the interface for the application, then interview me as a user about how to change it and adapt it as we go. And it does it. I get a little playable interface for a game and I can then edit the game and say like, oh, I wish it was more.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's not about verticalization as much as opinionated, right? I think you need to have a strong opinion of what the future looks like and where the gaps are going to remain. This is a jagged technology. Figure out where you think there's going to be jaggedness, and that can be organizational jaggedness, interface jaggedness. But I mean, you're also basically the real problem right now is every startup in the world is betting against AGI, which I find really funny because all the funders are like, yeah, AGI is coming in next five years. If it is, why are you funding these startup companies? None of them survive in an AGI world.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that what you should be thinking about is have a position on the future. And the startups you talk to have to have a position on the future of AI. How good does it get and how does your model work? The second thing I think people need to be thinking about is how actual adoption happens again. It used to be that if you have a large enough market to play with, we'd just go after all of it and some part of it starts to respond and we double down in that section. You're going to be much more opinionated about how you imagine your technology being spread or adopted. How does it spread throughout our organization? Is it fit? How does it fit with the organizational structure and approach? Requires people to have more plan and strategy than they did before rather than just letting the market tell them the answer.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The applications they're building are like these very narrow, like, hey, I slapped something on top of llama. That's not going to do it”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, BCs have funded this model, right? And it's like deep tech medical things where you're making larger bets in the future, where there's payoff is where when it's revealed to the world, you're going to succeed or not, right? And where you're making a bet on technology itself, that's where VC got its start. It sort of became perverted a little bit to this like, how do I get make money fast machine? I mean, not that fast, right? It's still years till exit, but there's the idea of like, it's all about parata rights and the idea of like, I make a lot of small bets initially and then I can double down on the people doing well and not do double down on others. And it's about finding the diamond in the rough. Like all of that stuff is a great model for funding incremental innovation. If the market's changing and we're used to markets changing slowly enough that like that's not a problem. I think it's an issue here. I think you need to be imaginative. I think you need to be subject specific. I think you need to assume model. I mean, it is very strange from one hand for all these people in silicon valley to be like, yeah, HEI is coming.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the problems of the lean method are coming home to roost. What every VC wants to see is they want to see product market fit. There's a method we have, right? You come up with like, you know, rough business model Canvas and then you go out and you talk to people and then you test in the world. That is not a good model for breakthrough innovation. That's a really good model for incremental innovation where you find market need. So part of this is that we're incentivizing startups to find solutions right now for a moving technology and they're just going to get lapped and they're not trained to be imaginative. They're not like they're trained to think money first and how do I get a market product market fit, which is fine in normal technological regimes. Not a great idea in radical regimes.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Designed to figure out how to minimize the effort they put into things. There's a reason why adoption rates are over 70% in universities for ChatGPT. And while they're like at a few percent elsewhere in the world, we figure stuff out like this. And I think that that's the other piece that's missing.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think multimodal is really the answer here. All the pieces are in play. Some of the most interesting people I talk to are really using AI are just having conversations with it. Like I think about Allie Miller, who's a really great sort of person who has been thinking about a lot about AI ex-Amazon person. And she has conversations with the AI every morning while she's doing her hair, right? Just the limited chat interface. Once these things have full visual, which they do, right? They have a lot of latent capabilities that people haven't recognized yet in multimodal. And you could chat with them, then it starts being more like a human on call. I think once you start adding agency into that where they can take action in the world, I wonder if we just sort of skip the step of, you know, how do you use these things to like, oh yeah, you talk to your phone and your assistant does the thing that you wanted to do. There is this narrow window, I think, where prompting style really matters, where being really up to date and these systems matter, but then they come to your phone. And also, by the way, if they save you time and work, if they really do do that, humans are exquisitely.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like a tech adoption curve, but tech people shouldn't have the advantage they had in other spaces, and word just has to get out.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On data journalism. And he was using Claude for OCR on political campaign donations. And when he checked back, he just found that Claude refused to do the work because there were names and addresses. And even though they were public, Claude was like, I don't want to violate anyone's privacy. Like, we're not used to systems that object to the task that they're given or sometimes argue with you or give you different answers every time. So coders are often not the best users. Often the best users are people who are actually really good at working with humans. I mean, my wife is probably one of the best prompt engineers on the planet. She's got a doctor who worked together with co-directors of the AI lab. She's never coded a day in her life, but regularly does stuff that open AI and anthropic are like, wow, that's a really amazing prompt. We didn't know Google used her prompt as the gold standard to measure their fine-tuned models against, right? But what she has is, you know, doctor and education when we're building educational teaching games for a long time and she has good theory of mind for other people. If you can write instructions, if you can manage, you can use this. So that's what I'm hopeful for.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I'll say yes and. Okay, so Denmark study I told I was talked about did find that the people using the skewed mostly male and mostly wealthy, right? People finding use cases because that tends to be a fairly common tech adoption curve. The thing that is unusual about AI though is first it's ubiquity. Normally getting your new tech installed means I've got to have know how to use a computer really well and be really in with like you know how do I get a distro from GitHub and like you know there's work involved that is that is a narrow set of work that requires time effort money that isn't the case here right the chatbot is accessible from a phone in you know 169 countries around the world have access to the world's best AI systems that's one thing right and chat is a fairly normal interface especially when you have voice the second is early evidence is that coders are not particularly good at working with AI right because it doesn't do the things you expect it to do my favorite example is Simon Williamson if you don't follow is terrific and really great at this stuff but he works”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is the case where I think we're being a little sanguine about this. I mean, I think every technological revolution, people lose jobs and then new jobs are created. But there's, you know, and we talk about this all the time. There are two big caveats to that. Caveat number one is not always, right? When the telephone switchboards went from sort of manual to digital in the starting, not digital, but mechanical in the starting 30s, at that point, I think one out of every 16 women had”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Solutions being a cost saving measure, right? If I get a 30% product reboots, I fire 30% of people. People are never going to show you how to use AI at that rate. And you're never going to win in a world if we really believe there's industrial revolution happening. So policies are really at the heart of the problem.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fired. They're worried that people will stop respecting their work because they realize it's AI written. Right now, Reddit's full of people saying, I'm thinking I'm a wizard at work. They're worried that people will realize you don't need as many staff members. So you fire them or you fire their colleagues or you won't reward them for it. So everyone's hiding AI use. I just spoke to women who banned ChatGBT at a major bank. She used ChatGPT on her phone to write the ban. Because like, why do it by hand? So once people start using it, they're all using it secretly. And I said we need clarity around how do you get rewarded for this? What happens if I automate my job? And to go back to our industrial revolution analogy, if you were a brewery in the early 1700s and you were serving your local community, which because everything was kind of local, and you got steam power, you kind of have a choice. Do I want to fire a lot of people and make the same amount of beer for less money and have a higher margin? Or do I want to be Guinness and expand my production around the world and hire another 100,000 people? And we're used to IT.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, so first of all, it just starts with policies. When you look at companies, a lot of them don't even allow access to GPT-4 because the regulatory environment is unclear. So one thing that would be great for a regulator perspective is not just we've talked about the negative side of regulation. There's a reason why banks are regulated or pharma companies are regulated. It would be useful for clear guidance about how to positively use AI. And I think there's been some movement towards that. That would be something I would want the EU to be doing a lot more of too. It's like, okay, what are the ethical use cases that we should be pushing and opening regulation for? But that extends the company policy side. Company policies are often very vague. Don't use this or use it, but don't get in a way that doesn't get you fired. And then there's a whole bunch of like uncertainty over how you get rewarded. What happens if you figure out a solution to your work? So what I find is inside organizations, when I finish with the talk, all these people come up to me and reveal that there were secret cyborgs all along. So they've been using this for all of their work, but they're not telling anyone. They're not telling anyone because they're worried they get.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It they find productive uses. So then the question becomes how are you harnessing those uses? What policies do you have? I mean, there's so much we could talk about about what companies are getting wrong.”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I speak to organizations all the time. I mean, first of all, almost nobody uses these systems. I mean, they all try ChatGPT. When I ask my hand, everybody's tried ChatGPT. Five to 10% of people in any room, whether, and that's, by the way, Silicon Valley actual people who aren't in a lab, whether that's at a large bank, whether that's at a conference of innovation professionals, maybe 5 to 10% have used those models and maybe 2 or 3% have used 10 hours, which has been my guideline minimum number. Again, there's no onboarding. You're faced with a chat bot. And when people are faced with the tyranny of the blank page, they panic. What do you talk to the system about? There's no information. There's no instructions. And so people aren't really using it. So the issue is that partially it's that they need to adopt because when people start using it, they find uses, right? So a new study just came out of Denmark of people who are using ChatGPT and knowledge intensive work environments. And, you know, they're estimating that over 30% of their tasks, they're saving 50% of their time. So once people...”
2024-07-31 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is More Compute the Answer to Model Performance | Why OpenAI Abandons Products, The Biggest Opportunities They Have Not Taken & Analysing Their Race for AGI | What Companies, AI Labs and Startups Get Wrong About AI with Ethan Mollick · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source